A recently-declassified US Navy report reveals that a powerful solar storm apparently caused a mass unintended detonation of US naval mines off the Vietnamese coast nearly five decades ago.
This development led the US Navy brass to speculate that the detonations might’ve been caused by "magnetic perturbations of solar storms", as many of the mines deployed in that area were designed to detonate when they detected changes in the magnetic field, and solar storms can cause significant magnetic field fluctuations.
A subsequent investigation ended up concluding that there is "a high degree of probability" that the mines had been detonated by the August solar storm activity, ScienceAlert reports citing a declassified US Navy report on the mining of North Vietnam.
"Now that light has been shone on the impact of these events on sea mine operations in 1972, the scientific community has another clear example of space weather impacts on technologies," the news outlet notes.